


Graves

by jeannedarc



Category: VIXX
Genre: Ghost!AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-02
Updated: 2015-12-02
Packaged: 2018-05-04 11:52:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5333108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeannedarc/pseuds/jeannedarc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Hakyeon could dream, he'd dream of finding Wonsik one last time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Graves

**Author's Note:**

> happy halloween, part ii. thanks to my wife for sitting with me while i did this one night, a week prior to the holiday. crossposted from my lj.

If he could sleep, Hakyeon wouldn't dream of bright lights that block out the pain of split-second existence before everything turned black. He wouldn't dream of the crash of breaking glass or the crunch of impacted metal, nor would he dream of the way the car flipped into midair during the course of the collision and its subsequent consequences. He wouldn’t dream of limply dragging himself to a body halfway across the road, already dead by the time it hit the slick pavement. He wouldn’t even dream of the way the body looked so peaceful, even in the midst of death, of destruction, of devastation.

No, if Hakyeon could sleep, he would dream of the times just before, of the night they’d had before their untimely death. And more importantly, he would dream of what it will be like when they finally see each other again.

* * *

He spends a lot of time around his parents’ house, which doesn’t make a lot of logical sense; he doesn’t have any particular desire to haunt his parents, and for the most part leaves them alone, except for those quick, dramatic moments when his frustration with not being able to communicate with anyone gets the better of him and he accidentally blows out a couple lightbulbs in the immediate vicinity.

It’s been five years, and those moments have grown fewer and further between, but they still happen from time to time. He considers himself lucky that they now chalk it up to faulty wiring rather than something supernatural.

When he’s not watching over his mother or making sure his father doesn’t have too much to drink too quickly, Hakyeon spends most of his time in his mausoleum of a room, reminiscing about the boyfriend he’d had for most of his schooling career and then most of his university career after that. Wonsik had been the love of his life, the cool and calm and collected that matched up with his emotional overacting. Which isn’t to say that the both of them weren’t saps for each other; Wonsik was simply better at hiding it, something that constantly frustrated Hakyeon to no end.

He remembers distinctly the rush his heart had experienced upon sneaking Wonsik in through the window, stolen kisses when they were supposed to be playing video games or studying on one of their rare, parent-sanctioned hangouts. He recalls hand-holding that made his stomach flutter and soft murmurings of sweet things that made his skin tingle just beneath the surface.

Truth be told, he misses these sensory things almost as much as he misses Wonsik himself.

He doesn’t know why he hasn’t crossed over yet; based on the many television shows he’s watched on the subject, Hakyeon is aware that most people who die cross to the other side immediately, walking toward some sort of bright light. He feels a little bit shortchanged, honestly -- he hasn’t seen any bright light whatsoever, nor has he felt any particular compulsion to go anywhere, except across the street to see how Wonsik’s parents are doing.

There are times he wishes he could sleep, just to pass the time. Everything seems to move more slowly when you’re dead.

* * *

When the night comes and his parents are asleep and not really worth looking after -- what’s the point of watching two people lay around for hours doing nothing, anyway? Hakyeon doesn’t see one -- he goes out searching. He doesn’t know where he’s going to find Wonsik, only knows that there has to be someplace where the love of his life has been hanging around.

(There’s always the possibility that Wonsik crossed over without him, but no. His heart might not beat anymore, but it can’t take that notion.)

So he goes to all the old restaurants they used to frequent, to the apartment they shared until they died, to the convenience store down the street that they used to run to at 3am when Wonsik wanted a beer and Hakyeon wanted a mango smoothie, to the library where they used to sneak away to ‘study’, to the trees in the park that they used to like to climb together when they were younger and ‘just friends’, to the clubs they went to when they were feeling adventurous and Hakyeon was craving adventure, even once or twice to Wonsik’s family’s house, a couple streets over from his parents’. He goes everywhere he can think of.

The restaurant is a different one now, and the apartment has new tenants, and the convenience store is the same but they don’t carry mango smoothies anymore, and the library is being torn down in favour of a new one, and everything is changing around him, and Hakyeon hates that he’s permanent in an impermanent world.

It almost makes him want to cross over alone, but he doesn’t want to avoid the truth that badly.

* * *

He’s been looking for years, and the only thing he can’t get out of his mind is that it should’ve been him thrown from the car. Maybe then he wouldn’t have to go on this ridiculous search for Wonsik. He roams the street at night, calling out in a voice that he hopes sounds to the mere humans as if the wind were blowing mournfully through a tree (even in death, Hakyeon is always a fan of the dramatic, even the dramatically depressing). He looks for Wonsik night after night after night, finding nothing.

When the sun comes up and it becomes uncomfortable for him to walk around, when the light passes through him and creates rainbows, when he doesn’t think his invisible legs will carry him any further, Hakyeon goes home to his parents’ house again. He lays in his perfectly-preserved bed, and thinks about all the blood at the scene of the crash, of the utterly brilliant Wonsik’s head spilled across the pavement.

Wonsik would have been a great musician, a brilliant scholar, an incredible father -- anything they decided to do, be it together or individually, Hakyeon has every confidence Wonsik would have excelled at it.

If he could cry without breaking something, Hakyeon would. But every time he cries the power grid for his parents’ houses as well as the eight surrounding houses goes down, so he avoids it as best he can by filling his days with…

With what?

Sometimes when he gets extra-bored he goes and scares children, who can see him perfectly -- something about their more recent connection to the womb keeps them extra-connected to the spirit world. He tells them not to get into cars on rainy nights when it’s too dark to see, especially with drivers who are brand-new and don’t necessarily know what they’re doing in inclement weather.

The first night he makes a little girl cry, he feels a deep sense of satisfaction, that he has somehow saved someone from the trauma of seeing the person you love the most cut to ribbons on the side of the road.

* * *

When he least expects it he sees flashes of blood and guts and crumpled car wrapped around a tree. Why people plant trees that close to the road, he doesn’t know, but he supposes he should be grateful that there was a road so close, that he could find Wonsik, see him one last time.

It had been an accident. The pavement had been too slick after a quick cloudburst, and the tires too bare, and they both too daring to understand that slowing down in bad weather is sometimes a consideration one must make. The car had spun out, and the front end caught against the tree, flipping the tail end upwards and throwing them both through their respective sides of the windshield -- Hakyeon the driver, Wonsik the passenger. Hakyeon could barely move, felt the splintering of his own bones even after he’d dragged himself over to his boyfriend’s body, bleeding out onto the tarmac, limbs akimbo, eyes wide open and staring up at the black sky.

Hakyeon hadn’t even had the strength to close Wonsik’s eyes for him, had merely collapsed atop him, grasping desperately at the collar of his shirt despite the pain that shot clean through him, as if doing so would grant him the ability to pull Wonsik back from the brink of death.

And that’s all he remembers -- his next memory is that of waking up and somehow just knowing where to go in order to attend his own funeral. He hadn’t attended Wonsik’s service, though he knew where it was held after a little bit of late-night spying on the Kims as they made their preparations, didn’t know if he could handle seeing his boyfriend, his lover, his best friend lying dead in a coffin -- if that were even possible, given the state of his body after the accident -- without destroying something in the meantime.

There are days when he regrets that decision, but those are only the days when he wishes he could find Wonsik the most, not because he wants to cross over but because he wants his everything back.

* * *

Hakyeon swears he feels the presence of someone else when he goes to their old apartment to see if maybe there’s something he missed. He looks around and sees nothing, listens and hears nothing, but something is...off. The bathroom light, which had always had questionable ability to do its job in the first place, flickers to the point that it starts to scare the people living there, and Hakyeon knows that something, someone, is there, but he can’t prove it’s Wonsik.

He calls out in that voice, the one he hopes sounds like wind, but gets no answer. 

Despite evidence to the theory that Wonsik has not, in fact, been there, Hakyeon stays around the apartment for three days, quietly avoiding the young couple that live there so as to not cause any particular brand of trouble for them. He mostly hangs out in their bathroom, which would be weird for anyone else but Hakyeon just misses being able to see his own reflection near as much as he misses touching things, which he misses almost as much as he misses Wonsik, whom he misses more than life itself.

* * *

 

It takes three days, but when it happens it seems almost fated, if Hakyeon believed in such a thing anymore. Funny thing about death -- it steals most of your hopes and dreams from you. But it does happen, and it’s a waking dream come true. Hakyeon is sitting on the edge of the sink wondering how awful his hair had looked just before he and Wonsik had died, staring down at the bitten-down fingernails he’d been sporting due to a long day of anxiety set just before a long night of incredible fun with the one person he loved the most.

When he glances up Hakyeon swears he could have a heart attack, if his heart still worked. 

“Hi,” Wonsik says, with a certain casualness that makes Hakyeon almost angry -- as if they’ve never been apart, as if they’ve been seeing each other every day for the past five years, just in death instead of in life.

“Hi,” Hakyeon croaks back, and the lights over the sink flicker a couple times. No. He will not cry.

But this is the moment he’s been waiting his entire afterlife for, and he has every right to get emotional. So he jumps off the sink, takes Wonsik by the hand and leads him out, away, down the street, against a fence and, eventually, _through_ a fence. They hit the ground, and thank God there’s nowhere to go after that outside a graveyard or the occasional sewer system or else they’d be falling forever in each others’ arms. Which, now that Hakyeon thinks of it, isn’t a bad way to go.

“I missed you,” Wonsik starts, clearly fumbling for the words.

“You missed me?” And Hakyeon is definitely crying, invisible tears streaming down his invisible face; he cups his own cheeks in his hands, hides himself from Wonsik as best he can, which isn’t very well considering the younger reaches out and takes Hakyeon’s wrist between gentle fingers and pries his hand away from his face. “I have been looking for you for five years. I couldn’t...I couldn’t cross over. Not without you. Do you know how you died? I’ve been thinking about it the whole time, wondering if maybe you didn’t get the chance to stick around the way I did. I’ve been worried sick that you were on the other side already and that I was just stuck here to wait for you until the _next_ time you died so that I could finally be with you again. So ex _cuse_ me if I don’t think ‘I missed you’ is good enough here.”

Oh, shit, he’s said too much, because now _Wonsik_ is crying, something he’s done maybe a dozen times in all their time together in life. Thank everything good and holy there’s nothing electrical close to them; they’d probably just blow it up in their combined emotional-ness.

“I missed you every single day, and every time I tried to find you, you’d _just_ wandered off somewhere else.” Here Wonsik forces a smile, reaches out and strokes the pads of his fingers against the apple of Hakyeon’s cheek. “I know you move around a lot, but I had no idea it was going to be this serious even after you died.”

Hakyeon is burning with a million and one questions, the first and foremost being ‘what have you been doing for the past five years besides looking for me, like you say?’ but he doesn’t ask one, just curls up in Wonsik’s arms and pretends not to be crying a little longer. He buries his face in Wonsik’s chest and knows that if any of this were physical instead of metaphysical he’d soak right through Wonsik’s shirt.

Wonsik, cool and calm and collected as ever, cries silently, squeezes Hakyeon’s shoulders as his spectral body is wracked with sobs, teases tender fingers through Hakyeon’s hair.

“It’s okay,” he whispers, kissing the top of Hakyeon’s head, “we can go now, and we can talk about all of this on the other side.”

* * *

The couple from before, the one that live in Hakyeon and Wonsik’s old apartment, wander to the convenience store at three in the morning. When they pass the spot where the two ghosts had finally come into a long embrace -- a tree stump with initials carved sloppily into it, located at the very edge of the apartment complex property -- they stop, overcome with emotion. They stare into each other’s eyes for a long moment, unsure of the source of the sudden burst of love they’re feeling, before one of them cracks a perfectly dimpled smile, kisses the other on his overlarge nose.

“Love you,” he says, and his boyfriend hums quiet agreement. They lace their fingers together and their hands swing as they make the rest of the trip to the store.

(Hakyeon and Wonsik don’t see any of this, of course, but if they did they would cheer enthusiastically at the sight of being such an inspiration. They crossed over years ago.)


End file.
